Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:11 Hello, and welcome to the Freemantle press podcast in 2022. My name is Brooke Dunnell and I am the author of the glass house, which won the 2021 Fogarty literary award and will be published by Fremantle press in November. This year, today, we are recording in wup in wajanja. This is a place of Bula, Bard, many stories, and I'd like to acknowledge our first storytellers along with Noga elders past present and future. My guest is David wish. Wilson whose latest novel is the saw dust house. David is an author of short stories, non-fiction and historical and crime fiction. Along with standalone novels, the summons, the coves and true west. He has four crime novels in the Frank Swan series, zero at the bone old scores, shore leave and line of sight, which was nominated for a Ned Kelly award. He wrote the AFL book Derby with Sean Gorman and his other non-fiction work. Perth was shortlisted for a wa Premier's book award, as well as researching and writing books. David coordinates the creative writing program at cur university and lives here in Fremantle. David wish Wilson, welcome to the podcast. So can you tell our listeners about your new novel, the saw dust house?
Speaker 2 00:01:23 So the saw dust house is set mostly in 1856 in San Francisco. It takes as a starting point, the kind of the real life figure of Yankee Sullivan, as he was mostly known, who was an escaped Irish, Australian convict, who became quite a celebrated or notorious figure in New York in that kind of gangs of New York. Lot of the film kind of millionaire. He was a, um, a reluctant boxer, but he became the American national boxing champion in a sense by default. But the story starts in San Francisco where he's in a prison cell. Um, he's been incarcerated for much of his life and he's pretty sure that he's going to be executed. It's almost a, two-hander, it's a largely a conversation between him and another character, Thomas Crane, but as his mind, as his condition deteriorates, due to lack of sleep and lack of food, the story begins to kind of fracture and be told in a kind of a discontinuous way. I guess
Speaker 1 00:02:24 The sawdust house has some links to your previous novel, the coves, which was also about the vigilant committee and turfing Australians out of, um, gold town, San Francisco. So how did you first come across the story of James Sullivan,
Speaker 2 00:02:37 Yankee Sullivan or James Sullivan? He's a, he's a very, very minor character in the coves, mainly because he was one of the best known Australians in San Francisco at the time as a, you know, celebrated boxer and a bit of a ish kind of character, his name kept popping up. And I, I realized he'd been imprisoned in the second great purge of Australians from San Francisco in 1856. So I, I just thought that was well, that was interesting because I'd never heard of this guy before. Um, even though he's pretty well known in America. So I just started doing a little bit of digging into his background, but at that stage, when I was writing the coves, he really was just a, kind of a minor background figure. He pops into one or two scenes and then that's about it. I wasn't sure that I was going to dedicate a whole novel to him.
Speaker 2 00:03:25 Um, for quite some time, actually, I, I just was interested in a bit of amateur detective work, I suppose. I just wanted to know more about him not thinking that I would write about him. It just seemed strange that he was known in America under so many aliases, but nobody really knew his, his real name or his real circumstances. And that's understandable because he was an escaped Australian conduct and he, he, he hit his identity deliberately and there was a lot of pathologization around his, his character and a lot of self pathologization. So that attracted me to look more deeply into him in the initial stage of anyway.
Speaker 1 00:04:02 Mm. And so, like you said, he's very well known, well, very well known, but for, for 150 year old character, he's still quite known in the boxing community in America. Can you tell us about how you managed to do research given he had all those aliases he'd been in Australian convict? How, how were you able to do that?
Speaker 2 00:04:22 Hitting the archives, you know, using great resources like trove and the old Bailey online with the help of two fantastic Australian historians, Ben Mountford and Tim COER. I was able to, um, locate what looked like his record. And then I found his, the transcript of his trial on the old Bailey online that attracted me to him even more because he was quite cheeky in court to his detriment, I suppose, because rather than just being quiet and polite, he accused the policeman who arrested him of corruption. And for a 14 year old, he got a 14 year sentence with hard labor, which is quite unusual, so totally back flight on him. So the fact that, yeah, he's a self-destructive kind of character or invertedly or his, his, um, his behaviors are so guided by his temperament, which is in term, was so shaped by his upbringing, you know, attracted me to him even more.
Speaker 2 00:05:12 So there was a little bit about him on the record is quite a lot about him in America. You know, there are a lot of newspaper articles about him. Some of them by him, there were plays written about him, um, that were performed in New York. His first kind of major title fight, I suppose, was important in America because it was the first sporting event in America where the Telegraph was used, even though boxing was illegal. They had a journalist there at the site. As soon as the result, we decided he rushed off somewhere, sent off the Telegraph, and this was spread all through America and Canada within, you know, minutes. There's a lot of stuff written about him, but, um, you you'll appreciate this too. What, what interested me in him as the character was the stuff that wasn't there on the Republic record? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:05:57 I wanted to know more about the person who, uh, behind the stories and behind the myth ization. I wanted to know where he was born, where he'd grown up in London, where he'd done his time in Australia. And so I was able to find out some of those things through conventional research. And then I was very lucky to be able to go to co cork city and the town abandoned nearby, where he was born searching through some old shoe boxes. We finally found his kind of family records, uh, literally just a wall of shoe boxes and the lovely people at the west cork historical society just said, look, have at it and took me all day. And I, you know, that was, that was quite a good fund. And I was lucky enough to go to San Francisco and, um, listen to some storytellers, one or two had, had heard of him and also in New York, but in New York I found there are so many colorful characters in New York.
Speaker 2 00:06:50 There are so many celebrated figures that he, he really wasn't known by many of the storytellers and the tour guides and the kind of usual people that a historical fiction writer like me would go to what I did find, however, was, um, ordinary people in America who, um, who are boxing fans seemed to know a lot more about him than the historians, you know, in my authors note, the back of the book, I know the conversation I had with the bartender who proceeded to regard me with a lot of the, the background details about some of his, his actions and some of the things he'd been involved in. And, and, and about the fact that he was, he owned a bar as well, which he was pretty proud of. Yeah, he's existed a lot longer in popular culture memory than in historical record memory, which is, I think he would be happy about as well as a, as a kind of a, a man without letters. And, um, as a, I suppose, a kind of a man of the people too.
Speaker 1 00:07:42 Mm. And his view of himself as a public figure, changes over the course of his life, which as you kind of, um, or the way that you represent it in the novel, which are, will, we'll talk about later, but I wanted to, um, touch on something that you mentioned there, which was basically all of the places that you manage to get to in order to research Sullivan's life. So he's a Catholic who's been kind of not really imprisoned, but I guess this town's controlled by, um, English, soldiers, Protestants, then there's the streets of white chapel. Then he's on the convict ship out to Australia. Then there's the, um, the Bush in new south Wales, there's New York city, there's San Francisco, all these really distinct settings. How were you able to construct those and put those into the story?
Speaker 2 00:08:29 I mean, the period when he was, when he, his early life took place, there weren't any DURs or photographs available. So I, I looked at proximate texts. I read a lot of newspapers from the period. I got a sense of the, the language, but also the way that things operated in the streets. And I read as much fiction as I could obviously written about the period, just to build up a bit of a mental picture. I mean, certain places like London and New York, they're very storied cities. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So there are plenty of contemporary texts written about it and texts written at the time. Um, so that just helps build up a kind of an imaginative picture. But then after that, that's all great and, and interesting. And I, I, I do love that kind of research. However, the fun part for me really is when I sit down and just start writing, and that's when the intuitive part of writing takes over, and I have no idea what I'm going to write, you know, based on the research I've done in the places I've gone to, and the imaginings I've imagined while I'm sitting on a park bench in that park, um, imagining what it was like 150, 170 years ago, that all kind of takes over.
Speaker 2 00:09:38 And I, I construct my own and it is ultimately my own version of history as it was at the time. Um, my own imagining of the way those, the streets felt sounded, tasted all of those kinds of things that the job of fiction right, of course, is to immerse his or her reader in that world. And that's all done through sensual detail. You can get a certain amount of sensual detail from the historical record, but really that's the part where you as a writer, that's your challenge, that's your job. And that's for me, fortunately, that's the real fun part of writing. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>
Speaker 1 00:10:12 Just to make it clear to listeners the way that your novel is written, you've taken both the first person, voice of Sullivan and crane in, and kind of alternating chunks of their, um, their communication with each other. And so beyond some of the things that you've said already, especially I think probably the old Bailey record was quite handy and getting an idea of what, um, what Sullivan's character was like with him being quite cheeky and talking back about the policeman, how else were you able to pick up their voices?
Speaker 2 00:10:46 It's pretty tricky writing about that period. Most people in those days, as we know, were not, um, literate. And there isn't really a written record of how people spoke and therefore thought, and most of the fiction was written in a kind of a form of standard English. I mean, there's some exceptions like Moby Dick and some of Whitman's poetry and, and, and some other text Brett Hart, but largely relying on newspaper reports and the work of poets and fiction writers. But even that is a kind of an approximation. So with crane and with Yankee, you don't know of course, whether or not a character is gonna work until you actually just shut up yourself and let them speak. I knew that I had to create a kind of a hybrid language for Yankee Sullivan. He was a product of many different places and many different cultures.
Speaker 2 00:11:38 And he arrived in Australia when he was 14 and he was here until he was mid twenties. So that was a kind of a really formative part of his life. So I, I imagined his version of English to be, have been shaped largely by that and some of his upbringing in, in, in, in east London. So then I just had to just be quiet and let him talk and see whether or not he would talk. Mm. And whereas Thomas Crane, on the other hand does speak and think in a much more standard English kind of style as a counterpoint to Yankees sometimes, um, uh, you know, expansive narratives where he's, he just lets his language flow out of him because he's, he's on the edge really, um, mentally speaking. Mm. Um, and so I wanted those two to work in tandem, but also counterpoints one another. And yet that, that was also the real, the real fun part I did find early on that Yankee was quite happy to speak to me, um, to tell his story, which was a great relief, as you can imagine.
Speaker 1 00:12:35 Yeah. And lucky for us readers, cuz he tells such a substantial story over his entire life story. And so it's lucky that you were able to get him to speak to you and to speak to Thomas Crane. I think one thing that's touched on in the novel a couple of times is that I think Yankee tells his wife that he thinks that he might have ended up a bit more like Thomas Crane in different circumstances. And then also Thomas Crane reflects on the fact that Yankee's the same age as his father and, and what they have in common there. What do you, think's the role of fate
Speaker 2 00:13:08 In life and in fiction, fate is everything. You know, when we look at it retrospectively, we can see how our lives and others' lives have been determined, but it's also nothing when you're living in the president, we dunno what the future holds, but I'm glad you raised that because I chose someone like Thomas Crane to be, um, Yankee's, you know, partner, I suppose, because he's quite different to Yankee. However, at the same time they see things in one another that they recognize as valuable. So, you know, having worked in the prison system for a long time and, and met lots of different people and having read some of Yankee Sullivan's letters to the editor, uh, in New York, when he was there, he had a very strong sense that had the circumstances of his early life been different. He could have been quite an amazing person. And so I think when he sees the character like Thomas Crane, who is reasonably well educated, thoughtful, reflective, he sees something in himself, had his life been different.
Speaker 2 00:14:05 And similarly, when Thomas Crane looks at Yankee Sullivan, while he's thoughtful and reflective, he's also quite buttons down and introverted. He's more like me as a person. I guess he sees something in Yankee Sullivan that he admires or he feels he lacks. And that is a kind of a flamboyance, uh, uh, a tendency towards honesty and acting out, um, his interior life as well. But he, and having that great Irish gift of the gab too, they're very different from one another, but they reflect one another in the sense that they both contain something that they feel that they lack themselves. And that hopefully creates a bit of an emotional transference between the two or, or, or a kind of a bond with regards to fate. I think I'm much more hopeful about Thomas Crane's fate because his early life has been so different. You know, if, if what Aristotle said about tragedy is true and that it's tragedy is defined by a, a certain kind of inevitability, you look at a character like Yankee. And one of the sad things looking at his early life as I did was the kinds of things that happened to him towards the end of his life were pretty much inevitable.
Speaker 1 00:15:14 Mm he's. A very thoughtful person. He did learn to read, I think over the, the course of his transport to Australia, because luckily he was shackled to one of the nicer fellow prisoners who taught him to read. And he's got a real way with words, even as his language is kind of breaking down from fear and hunger and sleeplessness towards the end of the novel, but he is a very thoughtful person and he has a, a lot of thoughts about having become a boxer, um, which was something that he didn't initially want to become. Can you tell our listeners about the kind of evolution of his thoughts about boxing or pugilism is the term more in the novel? Um, over the course of his life,
Speaker 2 00:15:55 Even though Yankee Sullivan is a boxer, um, he's a reluctant boxer and the novel isn't really about boxing. It's, it's more a study of character, I suppose, at least that's how I see it. And he's someone who's early life was difficult. He was certainly, um, well regarded as a, as a boxer, almost a, you know, as someone who was invincible, however, he was also someone who suffered a, a horrific amount of violence and abuse himself, particularly in Australia. I mean, one of the things I found out about him that interested me was, you know, in keeping with his behavior in the London courtroom, when he arrived in Australia as a 15 year old, he was a, a serial ESCAP. Um, and each time he escaped, he was, he was flogged. And then at the age of 16, he was sent to Morton bay, penal colony, um, under the, during the reign of, uh, common down Logan.
Speaker 2 00:16:51 And in fact, one of the texts that guided me in writing about this was the I, the great west Australian band of drones song 16 straws. But knowing that Yankee as a, as a boy, literally a boy, a 16 year old was sent to Morden bay under the rain of common down Logan. It was horrific horrific place and he still escaped from there. Um, there was nowhere to escape to, it was just the Queensland Bush. And he was a as a white fella, he, he wasn't privy to the, to the understandings of how to get food from the Bush. And he was, he was on the run for a few months before, I guess he handed himself back in. He was flogged. And then he was sent back to sit down his flogged again and again and again. So he like so many working class kids from around the world still today, used boxing as a way to escape poverty.
Speaker 2 00:17:38 There's an old boxing saying that, you know, a, a good boxer can't sleep in, in silk sheets, this idea that the, the rough and tumble background that most boxes come from, uh, conditions them and shapes them and makes them into, uh, the fighting machines that they are holds kind of true. So he, he has those double aspects. He understands violence as something that has been done to him, and he understands violence as it's practiced in the boxing ring. But I see it as he's a reluctant boxer, he doesn't enjoy it. And he, he doesn't enjoy looking at the faces of the people in the crowd who are getting this kind of vicarious pleasure from watching two men beat the hell out of each other. He's trapped there because it's the one thing he's good at. It's the one thing he's famous for. He earns a lot of status out of it. So in a sense, he has to keep doing it whether or not he wants to or not. And in the end, it's his downfall as well because, uh, you know, he moves to San Francisco and his notoriety. He becomes the very thing. That means that he gets caught, uh, caught up in the, the most recent purge of Australians. They wanna get a big kind of head on head on a, a park, if you like.
Speaker 1 00:18:45 Yeah. He's got a lot of really thoughtful things to say to Thomas Crane about the nature of violence. And so he and his opponent are kind of on the same side versus the crowd. And versus the men, who've kind of arranged the match and profiting off it. And a lot of men that he encounters throughout all the places he lives, enjoy violence, either being violent, like the, the people at Morton bay who flog in continuously, or they enjoy the administrative part of violence where they're sentencing people to things or enjoying watching people being punished yet, I would argue that when he can be Yankee Sullivan manages to be a good man, um, especially to his family and equally Thomas Crane is deep down. He's a good man, but you struggle to find other characters in the book who are equally good. So was it important to you to represent the two of them in that way?
Speaker 2 00:19:43 Yeah. Box boxes are interesting. I mean, boxes I've met have been basically not, not what you would expect. I mean, they're, unfortunately, you know, the boxing industry at the moment is it very much relies on publicity and, and inverted come as bad publicity, two people yelling at each other, uh, certain degree of spitefulness. And then this is all about prodding the media to build up rivalry and all of that kind of thing, but boxes I have met. And in fact, lots of hardcore criminals that I have met have been very articulate and very gentle people, which is not what you would expect at all. And I think Yankee, he is, he is in essence, not only, uh, trying to be a good man and having the potential a, a much greater potential than has been able to be realized, but he, you know, he sees that in, in, in Thomas Crane as well, that kind of gentleness that he, um, he kind of aspires to as well.
Speaker 2 00:20:33 And like I said, crane sees something back in him. This is what ultimately led me to write about him. The fact that he was well known, the fact that he was a boxer and the fact that he was a convict, it wasn't enough for me personally, to write about him, cuz the world is full of colorful characters. It was, um, something his wife said after he'd been imprisoned that suggested to me greater deaths in his character, you know, she, she talked about his vulnerability and melancholia and particularly fears are being sent back to Australia where he'd been so terribly, uh, treated that to me, made him immediately interesting as well as the fact that he was a cheeky character. Cause I like cheeky characters generally speak the way I've structured. The story is designed to bring that out. So, you know, there are moments of brief monologue. There are moments of, um, conversation between him and crane as his mind, you know, slowly fractures and dissolves. But the stories that he tells are both for him, a distraction from his distressing and terrible reality, but also hopefully an illustration of his, you know, a joy for life, all, all of those kinds of normal human things. Mm.
Speaker 1 00:21:40 So to talk about your kind of career to date, so you've earned a really good reputation for your historical fiction, crime fiction novels. Uh, so what is it about these genres that draws you to, to crime and to historical fiction?
Speaker 2 00:21:55 Generally speaking, what draws, what attracts me to historical fiction is the fact that it isn't historical, what it, what happens in the kind of historical fiction text. I like to write, hopefully reflect things in the present in a clearer way, because you know, we live in the present. The present is always confusing. The present is always happening. It's very hard to get a clear handle or picture of what's going on around us. And it's surrounded by theories. And there's a kind of clarity that comes with retrospection, I suppose, if that's even a word. And so with historical fiction, it's this an idea that yeah, you can see certain things more clearly in history and when you represent them in a fictional text that in turn that becomes extra kind of clarified. And what attracts me to crime fiction is the way that crime fiction, when it's well done can be entertaining for reader cuz that's always, my first, first aim is to entertain my reader.
Speaker 2 00:22:48 It's the only kind of form of text that I know where you can be political and you can be provocative. And you can write about all those in, you know, fascinating things to do with human behavior. All writing is about curiosity and fascination with human behavior. There are certain dramatic elements. It brings into clearer focus. Some of those aspects of human behavior, which usually remain hidden. So with my kind of crime fiction, the Nu kind of story, the, the general style is that you put people in extreme situations and you see how they behave. And people in extreme situations learn things about themselves that they might not normally know about themselves. Am I brave? Am I a coward? Am I a loyal friend? Am I disloyal? Am I really who I say I am? Because we all tell narratives about ourselves and our cultures tell narratives about ourselves and crime fiction is a form where you can be political. You can talk about these things, but in a way that isn't didactic in a way that isn't beating your reader over the head, it's all there in the background of the text of what is hopefully an entertaining read, but it can be when well done it can be quite a philosophical genre. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:23:54 So you are the head of creative writing at cur university. What's some of the kind of mistakes that you see emerging writers making. And what's the advice that you tend to give to your students?
Speaker 2 00:24:07 The first thing I I do when I meet my new cohort of students, as I did a couple of weeks ago, is congratulate them on taking creative writing course. I mean, I know there's this whole discourse about its value or lack of value or whatever, but I, what I recognize in it not having come from that kind of background, having in a sense taught myself to write is just the huge value of finding your people. So the first thing I say is fantastic. I love you great. You're here together, make these friendships, some of which will last for the rest of your life. Find out who has similar writing interests and you know, start your own little writing groups and sharing, sharing your work and that kind of thing. It answer to your question. The main problem I see is a perfectly understandable one mm-hmm <affirmative> and that is overcoming what we call the fear of the known overcoming this fear that your life is somehow not authentic.
Speaker 2 00:24:59 Your life is somehow not as interesting as other people's lives and your suburb is not as interesting. And you'll city is not as interesting. Um, this doesn't mean you have to, you know, write about what, you know, purely, that's not what I'm saying, but trying to explore your world first and find the stories that are contained within it, trying to recognize the wealth of story, um, the wealth of character, which is all around you. It's in, it's in your house, it's in you, it's on the bus on the way to, on the way to university looking there first, before you start writing a, um, a story said in New York, because somehow New York is a more interesting place than Perth or, and in fact, I U I don't do it anymore, but I used to say in, in the week, one of some of my, um, classes, I would say, if you set a story in New York or London or Los Angeles, um, without a good reason, I'm gonna fail your work. <laugh> it was a little bit too shocking. So I don't say that, but generally that's that, that's the main problem overcoming the fear that somehow you are, you are not interesting enough and your world is not interesting enough, which is, is just, just totally not true once you, once I think students realize that and they start looking around them more closely, that's when material and the stories start to emerge, but that's, that's got to be the first step.
Speaker 1 00:26:14 Yeah. Fantastic. So thank you so much. So that was David wish, Wilson talking about his most recent novel, the saw dust house. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the Freemantle press podcast on your favorite app. I'm Brooke Dunnell Fogarty award winner and the author of the glass house. I look forward to joining you next time as we talk to yet another fantastic storyteller from the west.
